A Fleeting Revival for Rockefeller Republicanism

Rockefeller began his tenth legislative session as governor on January 3, 1968 with a call for economy, while reaffirming the need to provide increased aid to local governments and social services. Despite a strained budget, Rockefeller announced a renewed effort to “rehabilitate slums” in response to the decade’s uprisings and provide opportunity for disadvantaged urban dwellers. Traditional methods of funding housing developments in New York had failed to meet the needs of racial minorities, low- and middle-income families, and the elderly. A 1968 estimate found that 14 percent of housing in New York State, the equivalent of 815,000 units, was deteriorated or dilapidated.⁷ Two months after his initial statement, Rockefeller announced a plan to create a new agency, the Urban Development Corporation (UDC), that would, when possible, attract private investors and developers to urban renewal projects. Alternatively, it would issue bonds to fund its own projects, especially for industrial developments. A couple of smaller programs he proposed would help individual home and business owners who were turned down by banks receive loans to rehabilitate their properties. Rockefeller announced the agency, which he projected would raise $6 billion, alongside legislative leaders and Edward Logue, who had led renewal projects in New Haven and Boston. It was Logue who counseled the governor to add the agency’s most controversial powers to override local zoning laws and acquire land through eminent domain. He had warned such powers would be necessary to ensure projects could be built in a timely manner, unlike Rockefeller’s previous attempts to build low-income housing in urban areas.⁸ The plan soon became mired in resistance from legislators who opposed construction of low-income housing in their communities and city leaders like Mayor Lindsay who feared the UDC would undermine home rule.⁹

While Rockefeller resisted efforts to give up the zoning provision, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated at thirty-nine years of age. In honor of the leader, whom Rockefeller had admired for his fight to open society, the governor demanded the passage of the UDC. Privately, Rockefeller sent three aides, including Wyatt Tee Walker, to Atlanta to help coordinate and pay for King’s funeral arrangements. According to Walker, King and Rockefeller remained close until King opposed the Vietnam War publicly. Walker recalled, “Dr. King had access to Nelson Rockefeller almost on a moment’s notice until Dr. King tilted his position against the war in Vietnam.” King began to speak out against the war in 1965 and led his first anti-war march in Chicago in 1967.¹⁰ In the days after King’s demise, Rockefeller and his allies applied considerable pressure on state legislators to pass the bill while Rockefeller was in Atlanta leading a delegation of sixty-two New Yorkers, including eighteen members of the assembly, who mostly hailed from New York City attend the funeral with him. Initially, the Democratic-led assembly failed to pass the UDC by a vote of 48 to 85, but eventually, enough votes flipped to result in a vote of 86 to 45. Democratic opponents of the plan accused Rockefeller of using King’s death for his political gain and questioned whether the UDC would benefit the poor. Notably, both the Republican-led senate and the assembly rejected an amendment that would provide $75 million in rent subsidies to the people who would be unable to afford the UDC-funded housing that would displace their old homes. The New York Times opposed the UDC because it undermined home rule. It published an editorial stating that a better memorial to King would have been the restoration of the $85 million cut to the anti-blight programs in the governor’s budget or to reduce cuts to the Medicaid program.¹¹ Such alternatives would have deprived the governor of the chance to circumvent public opposition and reshape the physical landscape.

As Rockefeller cajoled the legislature to fall in line before and after King’s death, his staff prepared for Rockefeller’s appearance before the newspaper editors’ convention where he planned to present the UDC as the model for a national urban policy program. Although Paul E. Neville of the Buffalo Evening News, who served as the ASNE program director, encouraged Rockefeller to make a major statement on Vietnam that could help him win the presidency, the governor instead focused on urban domestic policy. Neville, nonplussed by Rockefeller’s announcement that he would not seek the Republican nomination, wrote Hugh Morrow to tell him Rockefeller’s ASNE speech would help “launch” him into the “top spot.” While planning Rockefeller’s speech titled “The Making of a Just America,” King was assassinated, and Morrow drafted a speech that began with a meditation on a conversation Rockefeller had with the late civil rights leader. King’s words were intended to serve as inspiration for Americans to recommit to racial equality, but in subsequent drafts, this theme was removed after advisers expressed fear that the speech would alienate whites.¹²

For voters across the country who may not have followed New York politics closely, Rockefeller was merely picking up where he left off during his Goldwater challenge, but his 1968 campaign embraced the racial liberalism he eschewed in 1966. Examining Rockefeller’s original ASNE speech and the revision process reveals the dilemma that arose as a result of the governor trying to align his campaign with the objectives of the civil rights movement at a time when the fragile consensus on civil rights had already deteriorated. In the original speech, Rockefeller said that five years before, King told him about a southern city police chief who had a “very serious problem.” “His problem,” explained King, “is that he doesn’t know he has a problem.” The text continued:

The policeman’s problem was his failure to understand tha[t] an era of meekly-accepted oppression was ending—and right there in the deep south. The chief didn’t realize that the cry for social justice could no longer be smothered effectively in a barrage of head-cracking or buried for very long in jail cells. The education of that police chief cost his city a great deal—in human lives, in damaged reputation, in lost prestige, and measurable economic loss as well. Many other American cities have paid a similar price. And yet, five years later, as we look at the current scene, it is reasonable to ask whether America as a whole doesn’t still have somewhat the same sort of problem as the police chief. For there are signs—frightening signs—of a collective failure in this country to realize bone deep, in all its implications, that we do indeed have a problem, one that could readily destroy our very way of life.

The recent outbreak of rioting was proof, according to Rockefeller, that the nation had a problem that the majority of Americans had ignored like that southern police chief. Rockefeller said that the rioting was not the result of criminality—a stark contradiction of the position he had taken after the uprisings in New York in 1964; rather, the men and women involved were “products of urban ghettoes that [had] literally crushed their hopes, their very faith in the American political system.” If the nation continued to ignore the decay of its urban centers, disaster would “spill across city boundaries and engulf the whole American middle class.”¹³ Therefore, the nation needed to rebuild its cities and transform urban ghettoes into safe and decent communities.

With the support of his advisers, Rockefeller tempered his message out of fear of alienating white suburbanites, but his central argument about inequality and neglect causing urban rebellions remained. Two of Rockefeller’s aides, Andrew von Hirsch and Richard Nathan, expressed a major concern that the first draft’s focus on the Black urban experience would alienate white suburbanites. A focus on ghettoes, wrote von Hirsch, would not appeal to the “self-interest of middle-class suburban whites.” Instead, urban problems should be framed in a way that would appeal to white suburban voters who would be more likely to be concerned about “the spread of urban blight.” Von Hirsch suggested focusing on an issue such as transportation because it appealed to white suburban commuters and ghetto residents who hoped improvements would increase their access to jobs.¹⁴ The final draft of the ASNE speech was intended to have a more universal appeal, but Rockefeller still argued that white Americans’ complacency had caused urban blight. He challenged the nation to wake from an “American slumber” that had fostered inequality and depressed urban centers. Rockefeller’s discussion about King was removed, but he stated that it was time for the United States to make sacrifices to rebuild cities and fight growing inequality, noting that while Americans spent $17.4 billion on tobacco and liquor, only $8 billion was spent on the entire war on poverty. In response to a recommendation from Henry Kissinger, Rockefeller opened the speech explaining why he was going to focus on American cities rather than Vietnam. “Our concern for freedom in South Vietnam,” explained Rockefeller, “must rationally relate to our concern for justice in South Chicago.” Rockefeller presented his recent efforts to rebuild blighted sections of New York as an example of what was needed nationwide. Rockefeller and his staff worked to temper his message; he insisted that the urban crisis affected Americans of all races, but his call for public and private investment—and sacrifice—to end what was understood as a Black problem did little to propel his candidacy.¹⁵

In contrast to Rockefeller, Nixon adopted a position on the recent uprisings that suited the mood of the majority of white Americans who had little to no firsthand knowledge of life in decaying urban centers and refused to consider “rioting” a legitimate response to grinding inequality. Nixon received a noticeably better reception from the same assemblage of ASNE editors. According to the New York Times, Nixon was confident and at ease and drew frequent applause (ten times) and laughter (twelve times) during his appearance two days after Rockefeller. Nixon told the editors that “while we all have an immense interest in helping the poor,” the nation must resist the idea that spending $150 billion or $250 billion could solve those problems. (Rockefeller’s proposals were estimated to cost $150 billion.)¹⁶ Nixon emphasized the need for private enterprise to invest in the nation’s urban centers and hire city residents. The following day in Minneapolis, Nixon criticized federal spending on cities as an attempt to buy African Americans’ cooperation so they would stop rioting.¹⁷ While the Washington Post lauded Nixon’s ASNE appearance—Nixon was more polished and poised than during his days as vice president—its editorial board questioned the popular desire for private enterprise to solve Negro poverty and unemployment. Generalizations, rather than “practical application of this theory,” wrote the Post, would not address the urban discontent that wrought the recent unrest.¹⁸

Rockefeller’s bid for the Republican presidential nomination found him once again pulled between his liberal instincts and a need to emphasize his conservatism in private meetings with delegates and party leaders. Shortly after the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy on June 6 in Los Angeles, Rockefeller, according to Theodore White, who joined the governor’s press corps after Kennedy was killed, went before audiences with the same message of change and emotion that had infused Kennedy’s campaign.¹⁹ During a trip to Los Angeles the following week, Rockefeller spoke of the need for “new leadership” in America and toured Watts to meet with minorities. The unscheduled visit to Watts—against the wishes of his Secret Service detail—was described as carnivalesque, bordering on pandemonium, as African American youths flocked to the governor.²⁰ Rockefeller capitalized on his charismatic campaigning style and liberal reputation to appeal to Democrats and independents who had been drawn to Kennedy. He also uttered some of his first criticisms of Nixon including his silence on the Vietnam War and opposition to Rockefeller’s urban renewal plans during this stage in the campaign. During the same California trip, however, when Rockefeller spoke before the “lions’ den of the ultraconservatives,” he presented himself as a more traditionally conservative Republican.²¹ James Reston of the New York Times wrote that Kennedy’s death had startled Rockefeller out of a trance and given him a new direction that was more natural to him. For Reston, Rockefeller was now being his true self. “Ever since he came into national politics under Roosevelt 28 years ago,” wrote Reston, “he has been comfortable only while moving to the left of his party. This is where he stood and fought for progressive policies in the 1960 Republican convention and this is where he fought and lost against Goldwater.”²²

Rockefeller’s leftward shift after Kennedy’s assassination did generate some interest in his candidacy, but it did not endear him to Republicans who would choose the nominee. Louis Harris reported in early July that Rockefeller had gained ground among Democrats and independents but at the expense of support from Republicans. “The closer he comes to demonstrating that he might be the one Republican to win in November,” wrote Harris, “the weaker he becomes in his own party.”²³ A Gallup poll collected two weeks before the convention found that Nixon and Rockefeller had nearly identical polling numbers, whether Humphrey or McCarthy won the Democratic nomination, with Nixon having a one-point advantage over Rockefeller against Humphrey.²⁴ Rockefeller’s late campaign that included speaking before delegates in forty-five states, while avoiding the primaries, alienated further Republicans who still harbored contempt for Rockefeller’s Goldwater challenge. Republicans preferred Nixon, the moderate Republican or “middling conservative,” who had proven his loyalty by stumping for a myriad of Republican candidates over the years and supporting Goldwater’s presidential campaign.²⁵ Even if he had better polling numbers, Rockefeller would have had little chance of convincing GOP leaders and delegates that they should nominate him instead of Nixon, particularly when Reagan, an unannounced challenger, enjoyed strong support from conservatives and southerners. Rockefeller went to the Miami convention hoping to present a moderate path forward for the Republican Party that would appeal to Republicans, Democrats, and independents but learned once again that there was little interest in his candidacy. Journalist Elia Kazan remarked, “I couldn’t understand why Rockefeller had bothered.”²⁶ Rockefeller’s quixotic three-month campaign marked the last time the governor would return to the racially liberal moderate Republicanism that inspired his soaring criticism of the Kennedy administration’s civil rights record.

Candidate Rockefeller on Welfare Reform

As politicians debated the state of US cities, the purported welfare crisis—an issue that was not inherently urban but often linked to the decline of cities—loomed large during the 1968 presidential election. Therefore, welfare reform became an important campaign issue as the nation’s concern about rising debt and inflation intensified disapproval of welfare programs such as Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC). One increasingly popular criticism was that the Great Society’s emphasis on services was not only too expensive but had failed and that alternatives were needed. An often-discussed alternative was the negative income tax, a progressive tax where the government would give low-income citizens payments to raise them above the poverty line. A second approach under consideration was the guaranteed annual minimum wage, or guaranteed annual income, which would provide income maintenance for Americans who fell below the poverty line. The negative income tax’s most influential supporter was conservative University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman, who had advocated for replacing public welfare with his tax plan since the 1940s.²⁷ As the calls for change intensified, Johnson announced the creation of a Commission on Income Maintenance Programs in January 1968. In the spring of 1968, the consensus among the presidential candidates of both major parties was that the nation’s welfare system needed reform or a complete overhaul. The argument was that direct-aid poverty programs, exemplified by AFDC, originally named Aid to Dependent Children, had become a drain on the nation’s limited resources both financially and socially in the 1960s. Established in 1935 as a component of the Social Security Act, AFDC provided financial assistance to children under the age of sixteen who were deprived parental support or care “by reason of the death, continued absence from the home, or physical or mental incapacity of a parent.”²⁸ However, in the 1960s, critics charged that the once minor program to aid widows and their children had become an incentive for racial minorities to remain jobless, give birth to “illegitimate” children they could not support, and seek ways to fraud the system. Although a negative income tax was the most popularly discussed alternative, presidential candidates, even those apt to support it, feared that publicly supporting it would alienate voters who considered it a disincentive to work.

The welfare reform debate posed a particularly difficult challenge for Rockefeller’s campaign because the year before, he had convened a high-profile conference on public welfare that recommended a politically unpopular reform—the institution of a negative income tax. Rockefeller did not believe he could support such a plan on the campaign trail but was careful not to oppose the conference’s findings publicly. In 1967, Rockefeller invited one hundred of the nation’s leaders in industry, labor, news media, philanthropy, and government representing fourteen states and twelve cities to a conference commemorating the one hundredth anniversary of the New York State Board of Social Welfare. Joseph C. Wilson, chairperson of Xerox Corporation, headed the all-male and mostly white steering committee—there was one African American member—tasked with synthesizing the conferees’ findings. Rockefeller’s hope was that the private sector would figure out how to fix the nation’s welfare problem by making the current system more cost effective and finding opportunities to employ welfare recipients thus breaking the “cycle of dependency.”²⁹ The logic behind the conference was straightforward, but the findings proved to be unexpected.

Rather than propose slashing welfare spending or admonishing longtime recipients, the business-minded men determined that the nation must provide more financial assistance to the nation’s poor, thus creating a political dilemma for Rockefeller. The conference attendees, who convened for two days in November 1967, after circulating working papers six months in advance, found that the welfare system had failed the majority of the nation’s poor. Despite eighty-one months of consecutive economic growth, observed the participants, millions of people were living in poverty. Eight million Americans were receiving public welfare at a cost of $6.5 billion to federal, state, and local governments, but thirty-four million people were living beneath the poverty line, which was understood as $3,100 for a family of four. Many of the conference participants recommended a guaranteed annual income as a solution, although they did see a need for programs targeted at children who received welfare because they perceived them to be raised in an “atmosphere of dependency and defeat.”³⁰ The final report read, “The present system of public assistance does not work well.… It is demeaning, inefficient, inadequate, and has so many disincentives built into it that it encourages continued dependency.… It should be replaced with an income maintenance system, possibly a negative income tax.”³¹ The steering committee also stressed the need for more research.

Even though the conferees’ findings were not free of paternalism, their position was in stark contrast to the House-passed Social Security bill that singled out mothers of “illegitimate” children on welfare as the cause of the nation’s welfare crisis. The bill instituted work incentives and penalties intended to cut the federal government’s contribution for welfare and slow the birth of children out of wedlock. Both houses of Congress passed the Social Security Amendments of 1967 in December and Johnson signed them into law right before the midnight deadline on January 2, 1968. Before signing the bill, Johnson created a Commission on Income Maintenance Programs to search for better ways to address rising welfare costs in the future. He also asked the Department of Health, Education and Welfare to establish “compassionate safeguards” to protect deserving mothers and children against loss of support.³² Rather than side with Congress, the Arden House report agreed with welfare rights activists such as Jeanette Washington, a mother of six who cofounded New York City’s City-Wide Coordinating Committee of Welfare Groups. City-Wide, like the National Welfare Rights Organization, opposed the myriad restrictions placed on welfare recipients like herself in favor of cash payments. Welfare rights activists shared some concerns with second-wave feminism, but the women involved, who had often worked as domestics or rural sharecroppers, sought a privilege traditionally only bestowed on financially secure white women, the ability to stay home and raise their children rather than the right to work outside the home.³³ The Arden House report, which was released on April 29, 1968, the day before Rockefeller announced his presidential campaign, created a problem for the governor when much of the nation railed against public welfare and its recipients. Rockefeller did not take issue with the Arden House report, but he needed to frame the findings in a way that protected him from conservative attacks. As a result, Rockefeller cited the report’s call for further research to refrain from endorsing its central recommendation.

Rockefeller ignored the Arden House conclusion that the government and economy had left welfare recipients in an impossible situation in favor of a plan that, despite euphemistic rhetoric, framed welfare recipients as problems in need of repair. In a series of statements released in June and July, Rockefeller laid out his own program for welfare reform, which was presented as a shift from “social welfare to social services”: welfare recipients would be encouraged to work and become self-sufficient rather than rely on handouts. Although there was a tacit acknowledgment that the economy had made the nation’s poor vulnerable, the emphasis was on rehabilitating the poor, particularly children who received aid, so that they could become “self-sufficient, economically-productive citizens.” Rockefeller also called for the removal of the aged, blind, and disabled from the welfare rolls so they could receive automatic payments from social security, which would reduce administrative costs and end the practice of periodically checking the recipients’ eligibility. This reform would also spare the aged, blind, and disabled from the surveillance that the majority of welfare recipients received. Rockefeller said his aim was to reintroduce the nation’s poor to mainstream society, but his reforms would continue to isolate and marginalize them. Rockefeller’s staff had advised him not to support the negative income tax, but he was also warned that he could “sound too conservative” if he did not offer an alternative.³⁴ The compromise appeared to be a plan that called for the federal government to incentivize the private sector to create jobs and focus on improved education, health services, and job training programs. His staff also recommended that he say the current welfare system disincentivized work, which resulted in a “dependency cycle” among recipients.³⁵ Even though Rockefeller called for many changes prescribed by the Arden House steering committee, he avoided the most controversial recommendation—income maintenance—while undermining the main thrust of the findings, which placed the onus of persistent poverty on the welfare system rather than the poor. Rockefeller’s public position fit with the mood of the day and a tradition of disparaging the poor rather than the research.³⁶

Nixon, like Rockefeller, ascribed to the idea that the poor were uniquely different from average Americans and had failed to take advantage of an economy that could provide prosperity for all. While Rockefeller looked to social service programs as the key to reversing the deleterious effects of welfare dependency, Nixon spoke of reinvigorating poor Black communities, by reimmersing them in the free market system.³⁷ Nixon—the “New Nixon,” as the press often referred to him—called for an investment in “black capitalism” in the form of “loan guarantees, new capital sources, and incentives to industry to provide job training.” The nation’s ghettoes could be revitalized by encouraging “black ownership,” which would lead to “black pride, black jobs, black opportunity and … black power.”³⁸ It was a positive reframing of the traditional Republican argument that welfare, rather than a lack of well-paying jobs, damaged minority communities. The federal government only needed to encourage the private sector to invest in the ghetto with tax incentives. Although Nixon did not refer to racial minorities on public assistance in overtly negative terms, he fueled the increasingly popular perception that the majority of welfare recipients were African American. He even went as far as to claim that welfare payments were white America’s attempt to buy off the Negro and “its own sense of guilt”—a premise bound to anger whites who thought African Americans had long ago received more than they deserved. Nixon’s position on welfare reform reflected his efforts to temper conservative reforms with optimistic assurances that by spending less on government programs everyone would benefit.

Rockefeller and Nixon were not unusual; except for Democrat Eugene McCarthy, who advocated for some form of progressive tax paired with “incentives for self-improvement,” all the prominent presidential candidates in the spring of 1968 opposed the negative income tax on practical or philosophical grounds.³⁹ The most adamant opposition to this approach came from California governor Ronald Reagan, who said he rejected the “strange” idea of paying a salary whether a person worked or not. He was also the most vocal opponent of welfare programs in any form; he characterized welfare recipients as “free-loaders” who believed work was for other people and program administrators as wasteful bureaucrats who collected extravagant salaries at the expense of the poor. Reagan’s statements picked up where he left off during his 1966 gubernatorial election when he regaled audiences with colorful anecdotes that included racialized stereotypes about welfare recipients living lavishly on state money while they neglected their children. The New York Times reported in 1966 that Reagan would publicly decry racism and bigotry, but his Orange County audiences knew “that their next Governor was talking about Negro welfare recipients, and illegitimate mothers at that.”⁴⁰ Ultimately, the Republican Party platform plank on poverty was critical of welfare and those who suffered from “debilitating dependence,” but it avoided inflammatory language or a call for major cuts.⁴¹

Welfare: An Insurmountable Obstacle

By 1968, Rockefeller knew well the threat AFDC could pose to a politician who supported the long-maligned program. His advocacy for New York’s public welfare system was arguably his most enduring and symbolically significant point of conflict with conservative leaders of the New York State Republican Party. Since the days preceding his imminent gubernatorial nomination in August 1958, his support of this social welfare program conflicted with a years-long effort by conservative Republicans to curtail expenditures on welfare by advocating for a one-year residency requirement for recipients, which legislators believed would lower costs by dissuading migrants from coming to New York in search of welfare benefits. Rockefeller kept a residency requirement out of the New York State Republican platform in 1958 and maintained that it was the state’s duty to provide for the poor, but New York’s welfare program remained an easy target for criticism. The one-year residency issue remained contentious and returned to the foreground during Rockefeller’s second year in office. Republican senate majority leader Walter Mahoney led an effort that resulted in both houses of the state legislature passing a residency bill in 1960, which Rockefeller vetoed calling the legislation “un-American.”⁴² The governor refuted the basic premise of the bill—that nonwhite migrants came to New York expressly to receive public assistance—by noting that recent statistics showed that migration to the state was commensurate to economic opportunities in the state. “The possibility of receiving public assistance and becoming a public charge,” explained Rockefeller, “is no more attractive to the new generations of migrants to our State than generations who came before.” He also noted that less than 2 percent of the money New York spent on welfare went to people who had lived in the state for less than a year, while one-third of the payments to new residents covered hospital care for the ill and people who were injured in accidents rather than welfare payments.⁴³ Despite Rockefeller’s opposition to welfare cuts, his lieutenant governor remained in support of a bill intended to remove “relief chiselers” from state assistance. When asked about Wilson’s position a day after his veto, Rockefeller tried to avoid controversy by saying he had not read the bill, but he agreed with its objectives.⁴⁴ Regardless of statistics and Rockefeller’s leadership, welfare was an issue that was impervious to facts.

Historically, the United States has had a tortured relationship with government-funded public assistance for the poor, and that uneasiness has shaped—and stunted—the welfare system in comparison to other Western nations. As a result, the United States developed a stigmatized and incoherent patchwork of uneven public assistance, administered by private agencies to disassociate the federal government from its role of providing a safety net for the poor. The main exceptions are Social Security and Medicaid/Medicare, which are federally funded. Welfare reform debates in the relatively affluent postwar era, even among welfare advocates in the 1950s, centered on “rehabilitation” policies that sought to fix the poor, whose poverty was believed to be the result of “psychological and social challenges” that would keep them poor.⁴⁵ With the activism of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, more Americans began to pay attention to the poverty and inequity in postwar America. Johnson pledged to wage a war on poverty, a phrase first used by Kennedy, and got major legislation passed in response, but his war did little to change often derogatory opinions about the impoverished in America. Although the majority of Americans agreed that hunger and poverty were terrible, they also believed these problems were in most cases the product of personal failings. The public stigma that was tied to poverty paired with a rising number of public welfare recipients in the 1960s, a period of relative prosperity, led many Americans to assume there was a troubling and unwarranted rise in governmental dependence. The nation’s fraught relationship with the idea of aiding the poor meant there was always fuel to reignite controversy.⁴⁶

Welfare remained a major source of conflict for Rockefeller for a third year in a row when Republican officials in a small Hudson River Valley community attempted to remove Black welfare recipients from the rolls to close the town’s budget deficit and garnered national headlines. In 1961, Newburgh, a town of approximately thirty-one thousand was in economic decline as its factories left for the South and West and the waterfront lost productivity to the trucking industry.⁴⁷ The Republican-led city council of the majority-white town attributed the city’s decline to its African American community, which they claimed had migrated there in search of work in the early 1950s.⁴⁸ One city councilmember explained, “The colored people of this city are our biggest police problem, our biggest sanitation problem, and our biggest health problem. We cannot put up with their behavior any longer. We have been too lenient with them.”⁴⁹ The town’s city manager, Joseph Mac D. Mitchell, first sought to close out thirty “borderline” welfare cases and reduce food relief allotments in February 1961 to offset the budget deficit caused by the cost of snow removal that winter. The state’s Department of Welfare obtained an injunction to forestall these cuts. Undeterred, however, Mitchell designed, and the city council passed, a set of thirteen rules aimed at reducing the welfare rolls. The new rules, known as the Newburgh plan, included requiring that new residents of the town prove they moved there because of a “concrete offer of employment,” converting cash payments to earmarked vouchers, instituting work requirements, and warning mothers of “illegitimate” children that their benefits would be denied if they had more children.⁵⁰ The Department of Welfare found half of the provisions to be illegal, but Mitchell’s plan drew praise throughout New York and across the nation.⁵¹ William D. Ryan, the Democratic mayor of the town, denounced the laws, but he was in the minority among leadership despite Mitchell’s failure to identify any fraud.⁵² Meanwhile, Mitchell said he was justified because welfare brought “the dregs of humanity into th[e] city” in a “never-ending pilgrimage from North Carolina to New York.”⁵³

A week after a committee from the New York State Board of Social Welfare concluded that some of the Newburgh plan was illegal, Rockefeller released a statement in July 1961 that opposed it and reiterated his commitment to the state constitution’s pledge to care for those in need. Although Rockefeller opposed the plan publicly and said he could remove local government officials from office if they implemented a plan that the state found to be illegal, he did not criticize publicly the Newburgh city council. Rockefeller did, however, say he opposed welfare “chiseling” and the use of public assistance to encourage idleness. The governor’s “carefully worded statement,” as described by the New York Times, and Rockefeller’s reluctance to pressure Newburgh officials until after the court ruled underscored the divisive nature of welfare for a moderate Republican.⁵⁴ Two months before the Newburgh affair, Rockefeller signed into law a compromise bill on welfare that passed in the senate 36 to 21 and the assembly 94 to 53. The bill avoided the strict residency requirement Rockefeller opposed but, in an effort to “eliminate chiseling,” dictated that welfare administrators must investigate a welfare recipient if they believed the person moved to the state to receive welfare benefits. Mahoney agreed to the bill because it stipulated that if a welfare applicant had lived in the state for less than six months, the state would presume they relocated to receive welfare benefits and would then deem them ineligible. The compromise was a win for Rockefeller because the bill was no stricter than the current law, but it propagated the idea that welfare expenditures were illegitimate. As Rockefeller prepared to sign the bill, he defended his decision during a visit in Harlem, which the New York Amsterdam News reported would be the first time a New York governor met with prominent members of Harlem’s African American community to discuss policy. Former Brooklyn Dodger and civil rights activist Jackie Robinson introduced Rockefeller at the event attended by African American community members. Rockefeller denied that the bill initiated a residency requirement, while praising a weak antidiscrimination housing bill that Mahoney agreed to support in return despite previous objections.⁵⁵ Rockefeller’s trip to Harlem in April 1961, followed by his efforts to avoid angering welfare opponents three months later, indicated that he hoped to find middle ground on the issue, but his reluctance to outright reject unsubstantiated accusations of welfare fraud was a prelude to his future position on welfare.

In response to the Newburgh episode, Rockefeller appointed the Moreland Commission on Welfare to investigate accusations that the public welfare system was riddled with dishonest recipients and wasteful administrators. The report submitted by the commission in January 1963 found that although New York’s public welfare system needed more centralized state leadership, better staff workers, and more emphasis on services to encourage independent living, there were no significant instances of fraud. The commission also found that in 1962, public assistance constituted 6.76 percent of the state’s budget in comparison to 10.27 percent in 1953, which disproved the common perception that welfare costs had risen sharply or that a residency requirement was necessary.⁵⁶ Although the commission failed to find evidence of the fraud or popular misconceptions about welfare that fueled the so-called Newburgh crisis, it did identify a phenomenon it called the public’s “factual malnutrition” about welfare. The commission concluded that people viewed welfare as a program that should be required only during economic depressions and believed that anyone who remained on it afterward was suspect. Unlike popular programs such as those for education deemed constructive for the nation’s future, public welfare was thought unnecessary in a time of prosperity. Americans, it noted, had virtually no knowledge that the majority of welfare recipients were the unemployable elderly, young children, the disabled, and the unskilled. Much of the criticism lay in moralistic thinking that welfare recipients should abide by moral codes stricter and more austere than the average person. Ultimately, twelve of the thirteen points in the Newburgh plan were ruled illegal in court, and the commission found that there was little cause for concern in Newburgh, where only 2.9 percent of the population was on public assistance.⁵⁷

While Rockefeller attenuated his endorsement of welfare after the Newburgh affair, his support was robust in comparison to Barry Goldwater who said every city in the nation should adopt the Newburgh plan. After meeting with Mitchell, who went to Washington, D.C. to generate support for his plan, Goldwater endorsed it, explaining, “I don’t like to see my taxes paid for children born out of wedlock.… I’m tired of professional chiselers walking up and down the streets who don’t work and have no intention of working.”⁵⁸ During the 1964 presidential primary, Rockefeller contrasted himself to Goldwater by filming an advertisement where he insisted that welfare recipients wanted to “earn their own way.”⁵⁹ Meanwhile, the governor criticized Johnson’s war on poverty and initiatives like the Community Action Program not because of the expense but because he wanted the president to be more specific about how the money would be spent. Rockefeller’s staff notes during the campaign were also critical of Johnson’s initial poverty message because there was not enough emphasis on the need for the passage of a civil rights bill to ensure fair distribution of funds to African Americans who suffered from a higher rate of poverty than the rest of the nation.⁶⁰ Rockefeller’s support of social welfare programs, similar to that of Johnson, was in contrast to conservative Republicans in Congress who joined southern Democrats in opposing the Economic Opportunity Act, which included the Community Action Program, on August 20, 1964.⁶¹

Rockefeller maintained his support for welfare programs and the government’s responsibility to address poverty, but his position became a liability that could jeopardize his electability. Welfare was not a major issue during the 1966 gubernatorial campaign, but that was partially because Rockefeller’s advisers determined that a full-throated defense of welfare was no longer good politics. Before the nominating convention, Pfeiffer learned that four hundred welfare recipients across the state would receive increased benefits to adjust for the higher cost of living. Rockefeller could take credit for the achievement, but his staff agreed to let the Board of Social Welfare make the announcement because there was no “political advantage” for the governor. Furthermore, state senator Earl W. Brydges and assemblyman Perry B. Duryea, Republicans from upstate New York and the eastern tip of Long Island, respectively, told campaign advisers that the governor should not discuss Medicaid and avoid identifying himself with it because it would hurt him with conservative Republicans; in fact, “efforts should be made to have local welfare Commissioners keep their mouths shut,” they advised.⁶² Although Rockefeller advanced the field of welfare and Medicaid in New York and called for more comprehensive aid to the poor, his staff concluded that he should not draw attention to these issues during the campaign.

By the time Rockefeller sought the presidency for the third time, he had established a record of supporting public welfare and committing New York State to providing a safety net for its poorest residents. Throughout that period, however, he was careful not to criticize opponents of welfare too harshly and, in time, subscribed publicly to the idea that the nation’s poor suffered from deficiencies that prevented them from being able to support themselves financially. After 1968, Rockefeller’s position on welfare shifted rightward during budget battles with the state legislature. Alton Marshall, a Rockefeller adviser, insisted that the governor’s thinking did not change fundamentally; rather, he realized that he could not “solve a problem with state machinery which needed to be solved [on the federal level].” Marshall explained that at first, Rockefeller rejected this idea, but he voiced the same opinion during his annual message in 1969; New York was no longer competitive with states like New Jersey because it had taken on too many burdens by itself. He believed Rockefeller had overtaxed the state literally and figuratively trying to solve problems that were too big for one state to solve and that federal revenue sharing could not fix New York’s “competitive disadvantage.”⁶³

On January 9, 1969, Rockefeller stood before the joint session of the legislature—both houses were Republican-controlled for the first time since 1964—and announced that New York faced a “grave fiscal crisis” that required significant cuts to the budget.⁶⁴ The refrain of Rockefeller’s speech was that the cost of state programs had finally exceeded the state’s revenues, and it was time to cut back. The New York Times explained that after “pleading for months with officials in Washington for a redistribution of Federal tax revenues to the states,” Rockefeller was proposing a 5 percent cut across the board in state spending to address the shortfall. James Reston observed that whether Rockefeller’s analysis was reasonable, “poor people will suffer most.”⁶⁵ As the 1960s progressed, the cost of the state’s Local Assistance Fund, which financed locally delivered services, increased most drastically. In 1958, social services totaled $141 million and grew to $1.337 billion fifteen years later in 1973. In the same period, social services began to dominate a larger percentage of funding for local assistance—it increased from one-seventh of the spending to one-quarter. Much of this growth was due to the state’s establishment of a broad-based Medicaid program, whose cost rose from $606.7 million in its first year in 1967 to $2 billion in 1973. Despite its increase, Medicaid was not the most controversial expenditure; public welfare earned that distinction.⁶⁶ The rising cost of welfare in New York City drew the most disapproval. One reason for the increased expense was that the number of eligible applicants for public assistance in New York City grew from 500,000 in 1965 to 1,250,000 in 1972.⁶⁷ There were several factors that expanded the welfare rolls including deindustrialization, a weakened economy, and increased knowledge about eligibility rules.

After years of resisting his own party and reliably supporting welfare, Rockefeller announced major cuts to the state’s expenditures for underprivileged New Yorkers. Rockefeller focused on the rising cost of welfare and said the federal government needed to intervene to help states with the expense; his preferred solution was a federal takeover of all welfare costs. However, in the meantime, he proposed significant cuts to welfare benefits.⁶⁸ In March, Rockefeller proposed a series of welfare bills that ranged from a 5 percent cut in “basic needs” to families to a 20 percent cut in fees to physicians and other medical personnel under the Medicaid program because of what he labeled the “most serious fiscal crisis” in the state’s history. Despite criticism, including that of Bronx Democratic assemblyman Edward A. Stevenson calling the bill “anti-Negro,” “anti-Puerto Rican,” and “anti-poor,” the reductions passed.⁶⁹ On March 29, the Republican-led legislature passed Rockefeller’s $6.4 billion budget, reduced from the original budget of $6.7 billion. The legislature approved Rockefeller’s proposals and included two additional measures intended to further curb welfare expenditures—a requirement that recipients report to state employment centers biweekly where they would have to accept any job offered to them and a requirement that anyone who lived in the state for less than a year and sought welfare benefits would have to prove they did not come to New York to seek benefits.⁷⁰ After six hours of debate, the assembly passed the welfare cuts by a vote of 83 to 65 and the senate 35 to 22—all but six of the thirty-five votes were from Republicans. The reductions would amount to $128 million. A year after Rockefeller’s 1968 campaign wherein he called for welfare reforms that focused on the rehabilitation of welfare recipients, Rockefeller singled out welfare as the expense most in need of reduction. The Republican-led legislature, which needed no encouragement, passed additional restrictions that further stigmatized welfare recipients. In an article titled “In New York, the Ax Is Heaviest on Welfare,” Sydney H. Schanberg credited Rockefeller, who he called “the principal architect of the cutback philosophy this year,” for the cuts to welfare. “For the first time in his 10 years in office, [Rockefeller] was in ideological tune with the ruling upstate Republicans in the Legislature, who are traditionally hostile to spending for social programs.”⁷¹

1970: Victory with a New Constituency

Rockefeller had numerous advantages over his gubernatorial opponent in 1970, but the Democratic ticket led by Arthur J. Goldberg faced several challenges that made it an easier target for the incumbent. Goldberg, an Illinois native, was a prominent labor lawyer in Washington, D.C. in the 1940s and 1950s, who served as US secretary of labor (1961–1962) and a Supreme Court justice (1962–1965) before Lyndon Johnson asked him to step down to serve as US ambassador to the United Nations. He stepped down in 1968 out of frustration over the escalation of the Vietnam War. Undoubtedly, Goldberg had an illustrious career in politics, including his pivotal role in the merger of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1955, but he was not a major presence in state politics. Goldberg won the Democratic primary election as the candidate endorsed by party officials, but his narrow victory in June 1970 left him with little momentum and a divided party. His election was the first time that the state nominated a gubernatorial candidate via primary rather than a convention since the state passed a new primary law in 1967.⁷² The primary exposed Goldberg’s weaknesses as an inexperienced candidate with a personality that was not well suited to retail politics. His running mate was Basil Paterson, a state senator who represented much of Harlem. Paterson, who was the first African American nominated to run for lieutenant governor by a major political party in the United States, won with a much stronger 2-to-1 margin despite concerns of a “racial backlash” by white voters. Although Newsday noted the weakened state of the Democrats and lamented the lack of campaign finance restrictions in New York, it identified Paterson’s victory as the one bright spot. Paterson’s win “demonstrated that at least in a Democratic primary in which only about 26 per cent of eligible voters turn out race doesn’t have to be an issue. Such a demonstration is welcome at any time and under any conditions.”⁷³ While Goldberg campaigned for the nomination, Rockefeller conducted his third reelection bid by spending $584,000 on his primary where he was unopposed for the Republican nomination. Between $6.8 million to $7.2 million total in comparison to Goldberg’s $1.7 million.⁷⁴ It was customary for Rockefeller to far outspend his opponents, but numerous articles reported on the possibility that a ticket helmed by a Jewish and Black candidate would make the election season ripe for bigotry.

Journalist Richard Reeves reported that Rockefeller determined in the spring that he would need to appeal to conservative Democrats—namely, white ethnic Catholics and blue-collar workers in New York City and its suburbs—to beat Goldberg. Reeves described it as the “silent majority,” while Rockefeller argued that it was about seeking out consensus rather than a new constituency. “To be perfectly frank,” explained Rockefeller, “I’m interested in enough votes to elect me. And my position has always been to be in the middle, to stretch my arms to either side.”⁷⁵ An internal survey from the summer of 1970 found that Rockefeller polled worst among Jews and nonwhites, while he polled better than average among men, Republicans, suburbanites, the elderly, the upper middle class, the college educated, professionals, and skilled manual laborers. Rockefeller’s posture, which was more conservative than during his previous campaigns, was in alignment with his internal polling data, which showed that he needed to appeal to the suburbs while downplaying his liberalism. A poll taken before the election found that 81 percent of New Yorkers who favored the governor approved of Nixon, while 59 percent of Goldberg supporters disapproved of the president.⁷⁶

Rockefeller once again turned to the Tinker & Partners advertising agency to highlight his record in popular areas such as higher education, state aid to local governments, and water pollution, while pledging action in areas of concern such as narcotics and law and order. The wide range of advertisements made the most of Rockefeller’s vague slogan: “Rockefeller. He’s Done a Lot. He’ll Do a Lot More.”⁷⁷ In a four-minute promotional video produced in October, Rockefeller highlighted his first endorsement for governor from the AFL-CIO. The support was due to his long record of generating construction projects and efforts by New York AFL-CIO president Ray Corbett to ensure that Rockefeller supporters and trade unions would have an outsized presence during the state convention’s endorsement vote. In the aftermath of the convention, Victor Gotbaum, a leader of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, accused Rockefeller of orchestrating a takeover of the convention.⁷⁸ In various advertisements, Rockefeller lauded the amount of money the state spent on therapeutic treatments for narcotics addiction, his call for longer sentences for drug dealers, doubling the size of the state police, and tackling organized crime. In a notable endorsement for Rockefeller’s law and order credentials, retired jurist Samuel Leibowitz praised Rockefeller in an advertisement credited to “Democrats for Rockefeller.” Leibowitz, who was best known nationally for defending the Scottsboro Boys and Al Capone as a defense attorney, was a well-known New York judge who advocated for long sentences and the reinstatement of the death penalty. Leibowitz urged voters to support Rockefeller because of his efforts to reform the courts “so that there will be a new deal for law and order.”⁷⁹ Rockefeller did not criticize Goldberg as harshly as his previous opponent, whom he associated with rising crime rates, but he made sure to highlight his lack of experience in New York politics.⁸⁰

Rockefeller’s campaign had thirty-one divisions dedicated to different ethnic groups and used computers to target campaign literature to groups as specific as bakers who might like a copy of Happy Rockefeller’s coffee cake recipe.⁸¹ Longtime Rockefeller associate Wyatt Tee Walker noted, however, that this comprehensive approach did not translate to an interest in the Black electorate that was comparable to previous campaigns. In December 1969, Walker warned the governor that his relationship with the Black community needed “immediate” and “aggressive action” if Rockefeller hoped to get the support he would need from the Black electorate. Walker described Black New Yorkers as “hostile, bitter, frustrated, [and] disappointed” and that those negative feelings were directed at the state government and Rockefeller, specifically “in the wake of medicaid and welfare cuts.” He told Rockefeller that he did not think all of the anger was legitimate, but there was a subtle critique of Rockefeller in his message. Walker, who said he had been trying unsuccessfully to meet with the governor, recommended that he make public efforts to declare Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday a state holiday to mend fences in preparation for the 1970 campaign. Walker said that Rockefeller advisers Morrow and Al Marshall had told him they agreed that Rockefeller needed to improve relations with the Black community, but a meeting with the governor had not materialized, “I suppose because of other priorities.”⁸² Walker believed Rockefeller would seek African American support as he had in previous campaigns, but the governor’s polling data showed he could win with a different constituency.

Rockefeller’s advocacy for welfare cuts the previous year set him apart from his 1970 gubernatorial challenger, who opposed the governor’s conservative approach. During the campaign, Rockefeller advocated a more moderate position that did not rely entirely on cutting benefits, but his advocacy for a “work careers” program for welfare recipients to counter the increase in the welfare rolls advanced the idea that people preferred state assistance to employment. Meanwhile, Goldberg defended the welfare system and its administrators from attacks. He argued that criticisms of the system tended to be groundless and unfairly critical of recipients who needed assistance due to no fault of their own.⁸³ Goldberg was critical of Rockefeller’s efforts to cut the 1969 state budget with “political gimmickry” that targeted welfare, education, and health, only to restore the funds the following year. Goldberg attributed the state’s fiscal problems instead to patronage, the proliferation of unneeded state agencies, and tax increases that soaked middle-class and low-income families, while allowing the rich and businesses to slip through loopholes.⁸⁴ The New York Amsterdam News, which endorsed Goldberg, observed that in an effort to attract white ethnics, construction workers, and groups who supported law and order as a means to repress Blacks and minorities, Rockefeller undermined his previous liberal stances such as his opposition to Goldwater in 1964 that had earned him support from Black voters.⁸⁵ In its endorsement of Rockefeller, the New York Times stated that he was a pioneer in the progressive wing of the Republican Party and a responsive leader who met the changing needs of urbanization. However, Rockefeller had “yielded to conservative pressures for cutbacks in welfare and Medicaid formulas” during the urban crisis of his third term in office. Despite this recent change, the governor’s overall record, particularly in relation to strengthening local social services, convinced the publication that Rockefeller was still the best man for the position.⁸⁶

Rockefeller again outperformed typical Republican candidates in New York City, but he achieved the gains by appealing to white ethnic residents who saw themselves as being at odds with the interests of the city’s African Americans and Latinos. During his first two campaigns, Rockefeller sought to build a coalition that prioritized civil rights protections, but he owed his 1970 success, similar to his 1966 campaign, to a deemphasis of his liberal reputation. Rockefeller lost New York City by a narrow 46 percent to 48 percent margin between himself and Goldberg, but he won Queens—expanding his victory margin from three thousand votes in 1966 to almost seventy thousand in 1970—and Staten Island. Meanwhile, he maintained his strength in the suburbs of Long Island and Westchester and experienced a much larger advantage in upstate New York. The press observed that Rockefeller’s embrace of conservative positions, which appealed to white ethnics, was at the expense of his previous gains with Jewish and Black voters. Some speculated that he may have lost support among African Americans because there was a Black candidate for lieutenant governor. The New York Times noted that the Black turnout did not meet the high expectations of people who thought Goldberg would benefit greatly from his running mate, who was the first Black person to run for statewide office in New York.⁸⁷ Newsday observed that Rockefeller’s support among Jewish voters in a predominantly Jewish section of Hempstead, New York, for example, declined significantly. In 1966, he won North Woodmere 54 percent to 30 percent but lost the community to Goldberg who won 70 percent of the vote. Meanwhile, Rockefeller’s support among Black voters in Nassau County dropped from 40.2 percent in 1966 to 30.8 percent in 1970.⁸⁸ Rockefeller received 31 percent of the vote in predominantly African American Central Harlem in 1966 but only 24 percent of the vote in 1970. Across Harlem’s four assembly districts, Rockefeller’s support declined from 37 percent to 27 percent; the decline was less dramatic because Rockefeller increased his support in Puerto Rican–heavy East Harlem, who gave Rockefeller 39 percent of its vote in comparison to 27 percent in 1966. The New York Times noted that Rockefeller campaigned heavily in Spanish-speaking neighborhoods.⁸⁹

Ultimately, Rockefeller won his largest victory margin—approximately 715,000 votes—matching Franklin Roosevelt’s 1930 reelection record. Richard Reeves observed, “When his regular private polls convinced him during his 1970 re-election campaign that he had to move to the right to survive, he did just that—joining the party of Dick Nixon, James Buckley, and all. It was something of a shock to Charles Goodell, welfare mothers and other assorted liberals, but Rockefeller did what he had to do for political survival.”⁹⁰ Rockefeller’s strategy to win reelection required he amass a more conservative constituency than in his earliest campaigns and even his 1966 campaign when he benefited from opposition to the civilian review board. Rockefeller’s New York City campaign manager, Fiorvante (Fred) Perrotta, noted years later that Rockefeller’s constituency shifted during the campaign to include working-class voters who had voted Democratic in the past but were now moving rightward. Perrotta recalled Rockefeller receiving a wildly enthusiastic response during a campaign stop among low-income Italians in Astoria, Queens, which was 6 to 1 Democratic, for example, when many on his staff feared Rockefeller would not be welcomed there. Perrotta concluded, “That really won in ’70, Nelson’s constituency changed in 1970 and what he had … was the so-called new coalition, blue collar workers really were up in arms as far as the Democratic Party was concerned and he won with the new constituency.… I’m not sure if he liked that or not but it made him win.” This change allowed Rockefeller to perform better in New York City than he had in the past; he only lost the city by approximately fifty thousand votes in comparison to seventy-three thousand in 1966.⁹¹ Joseph Canzeri, a Rockefeller advance man in upstate New York, described Rockefeller’s win more succinctly: “He was elected by the Irish and the Italians, who would not vote for a Jew and a black on the top of the ticket.… I feel that there was a certain element that elected him because they put the wrong ticket together.” Canzeri also recalled using that latter point to Rockefeller’s advantage. Once he realized that the Democratic campaign had not distributed posters with the two candidates’ images, he did the work for them. “I arranged to have a few thousand posted to trees in some of the little communities,” explained Canzeri. “Nobody told me to do this. They weren’t showing Paterson upstate. I felt that the people in New York State ought to have the opportunity to know who was running.” Canzeri said that Rockefeller did not encourage racist or bigoted sentiments, but he did benefit from such views among voters who did not want to vote for a Jewish or Black candidate. After the election, the Washington Post reported that upstate Republicans “covertly” referred to the Democratic ticket, which had four Jewish candidates and one Black candidate at the top of the ticket, the derogatory shorthand of “four Jews and a Jig.”⁹²

A subtler sign of Rockefeller’s shifting politics and constituency was his relationship with the Conservative Party of New York. The party founded to challenge Rockefeller’s liberalism still ran Paul Adams as its candidate for governor, but there were numerous signs that the Conservatives were no longer at odds with Rockefeller and the state party he helmed. After finding more common ground with Rockefeller during the legislative session, the Conservative Party endorsed over one hundred Republican congressional and legislative candidates, and party leadership, other than Adams, refrained from criticizing Rockefeller. Rockefeller did not endorse the Conservative Party’s candidate for US Senate, James Buckley—he had appointed the moderate Republican he sought to replace Charles Goodell; he was careful not to criticize the challenger who ultimately won. With Buckley’s election, the fledgling Conservative Party enjoyed its greatest victory yet. Cofounder J. Daniel Mahoney described the party’s success as “far, far beyond anything we expected” at the party’s founding. Since first nominating a candidate in 1962, the party had doubled its tally of votes in every election signaling that resistance to big government and the associated taxes, along with an anti-city ethos, were growing in popularity across the state.⁹³

In his 1968 campaign book Unity, Freedom and Peace: A Blueprint for Tomorrow, Rockefeller began by expressing his admiration for Theodore Roosevelt (“what a fabulous, zestful life he led!”).⁹⁴ In Roosevelt’s presidency, Rockefeller found inspiration for his own campaign and drew attention to the ways in which they both shared in Lincoln’s commitment to equality and a faith in the nation’s institutions. A quote Rockefeller shared from Roosevelt introduced the logic for his campaign. “The most timid rabbit alive is not afraid of a dead issue. It is only the live issues that make timid politicians run away and crooked politicians walk crookedly. It does not need any courage to take the right stand against slavery and secession when we speak of Lincoln, for the excellent reason that both slavery and secession are dead. But it takes real courage to apply Lincoln’s teachings to the industrial and political conditions of the day. And therefore only a man with some stuff in him will make the effort.”⁹⁵ Rockefeller, of course, said he was prepared to apply Lincoln’s teachings to present-day problems. He noted that despite the nation’s great wealth, “thirty million of our people still live in poverty, insecurity and fear.” He cited statistics about racial inequality between African Americans and whites as evidence of a need for new leadership. “Twelve percent of white Americans and 41 percent of black Americans are not sharing in our ways of life, our American dream. Infant mortality rates are actually higher in the United States than in ten other nations, especially among our Negro citizens.” He then argued that government should provide incentives for the business sector to address such “human concerns” so more people could enjoy the American dream. Later in the chapter, after discussing a need for a new approach in Vietnam, Rockefeller wrote, “We cannot win the trust and confidence of continents of other colors until we honor our citizens descended of slaves.”⁹⁶ These were the tried-and-true themes that Rockefeller advanced throughout his career as the case for his electability. Rockefeller presented himself as the leader who could meet the example of Lincoln and Roosevelt, but his governorship had already shown cracks in the facade.

Rockefeller’s final campaigns—his quixotic 1968 presidential bid and successful 1970 gubernatorial reelection run—once again tested his theory that Republican electability must rely on a multiracial, cross-class constituency. Ultimately, his 1968 presidential campaign became the final act for his racial liberalism and advocacy for an active government committed to meeting the demands of the civil rights movement and entrenched urban inequality. Critics of Rockefeller’s calls for urban investment after a flurry of urban uprisings dismissed his plan as the result of white guilt and a reward for lawlessness, but resistance to government investment in a racialized urban poor preceded the 1960s uprisings. Upon his defeat in 1968, Rockefeller sought a new conservative path forward that no longer aimed to bring together urban and suburban communities.

Rockefeller’s 1970 victory capitalized on his willingness to target spending for the poor in 1969 and set him on a course that would lead to increasingly conservative outcomes. In his analysis of Goldberg’s defeat that marked the end of his storied career in public life, historian and Goldberg biographer David L. Stebenne concludes, “Like New Deal liberalism itself, of which he had been such an influential exponent, Goldberg’s hour had passed.”⁹⁷ The same was true of Rockefeller Republicanism, but with a fourth term ahead for Rockefeller and his ambitions unsatisfied, a more full-throated rejection of racial liberalism was yet to come. During his time in public office, Rockefeller sought to fuse together a diverse constituency that spanned the political spectrum. However, by the end of the 1960s, it became increasingly difficult to unify voters across the political spectrum and urban-suburban divide. After Nixon’s election, Rockefeller continued his rightward shift on specific liberal domestic policies that applied to racially controversial issues like welfare reform. Nixon’s adoption of conservative rhetoric not only on race but also on the purview of the federal government served him well in 1968 and provided an example of a viable path forward for Rockefeller. By 1969, when Rockefeller’s political capital was declining in New York, he decided to accept and take advantage of the conservative answers that a substantial number of Republicans had hoped he would adopt when he first accepted the Republican gubernatorial nomination in 1958. Liberal Democrats also felt the effects of changing public opinion, but racially liberal Republicans were especially vulnerable as the nation shifted rightward. Rather than risk his own career to defend positions that had lost popularity or leave the Republican Party, Rockefeller embraced policies that degraded his racial liberalism. Journalists Michael Kramer and Samuel Roberts described the 1968 election as “a very special tragedy” for Rockefeller, but New York’s most vulnerable populations would pay the steepest price for Rockefeller’s diminished prospects.⁹⁸